The United States Post Office paid sculptor Frank Gaylord $775,000 to create his stunning Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington’s West Potomac Park. Another artist, photographer John Alli, took a photo of the Memorial covered in snow and licensed the photograph to the United States Postal Service for use on a postage stamp. He received $1,500.

The stamp made $30,000,000!

Windfall for the financially challenged Post Office. No, sorry.

Frank Gaylord sued the USPS for copyright infringement. A lower court limited Gaylord’s damage to the typical fee USPS pays, around $5,000. On appeal, the court reversed this limitation and held that Gaylord may be entitled to a 10 percent royalty ($3 Million?) based on his typical fee arrangements for licensed images of his work.
The trial court had also been reversed on its original holding that the Alli photograph was actually protected by principles of fair use. (See Harrison Firm excellent review of prior proceedings.)

Strange case, this one. Artist paid almost $1 million dollars for sculpture seeks more. Artist who creates the actual images upon which stamp is based receives next to nothing. Prominent artists from all genres chime in to support the transforming art and artist fair use exception to copyright in this and the Cariou litigation.

“The capacity of people to participate in culture and express themselves resides squarely in their ability to reference, change, modify, dissect, and criticize existing expression.” (On this brief, Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.)

Especially troubling to me here is that the underlying artistic work was commissioned for public consumption.

Are the courts confused in overturning the fair use claim because they see an imagined commercial windfall by the USPS? Is the stamp really Gaylord’s work? If it were a photograph of the Frank Gehry NYC apartment building blown up by terrorists, how would that case come out?

Jan. 2013 Average Startup Salaries

According to PandoDaily, the average salary for a dev across all the job postings is naturally higher than for other positions, at $93,000; for marketers it's slightly less at $92,000 and designers are earning $88,000 on average.
As for the NYC companies with the highest average salary: Stylecaster and Venmo boast an average salary of $176,000, so if you have any friends who work there, they better not even think about asking you to split the brunch bill. Rewind.me, Bonobos and Bookish dole out an average salary of $126k. Most jobs fall into the $80-90k range, with an average salary of $87,000: Fitocracy, Seatgeek and Skillshare all fall into this category.
per AngelList